Romola garai quotes

The worst thing you can do as a performer is to judge your character in any way, positively or negatively.

I get grumpy about the innate conservatism of our tastes; I love bold theatre, and I get annoyed when a heritage piece is really successful.

If you read reviews that you think by their very nature are not respectful of the actresses involved or not appreciating the work as it should be, I think you should write to reviewers or comment and say, "Are you kidding me?"

I can't spend the rest of my life being pretty in a bonnet.

Women don't question themselves when they enter into a story that has male characters, but men do question the validity of a female narrative.

I think it took a long time for me to realise that as much as I respect reviews and do engage with reviewers as a viewer of the theatre, television and film it's really unhelpful. Even if people make perceptive and interesting comments about your performance, it is so subjective and you will come in and change what you do, you can't help it.

I've worked with actors who tell everyone what to do in the scene - that makes me go pretty atomic.

I would like to know that I was still going to be employed as a woman well into my 60s. In acting terms, a career that spans a lifetime is a very hard thing to achieve, particularly as a woman.

I think I was quite lucky in that I went to an all-girls school. I was never put in an environment where I had to be the other - the woman as opposed to the man - all the way through my education. I was never made to feel that way at home.

I'm not interested in going to see films that massively overrepresent men over women. It's lik,e how much more have we got to say about this? Like men in war and dealing with their masculinity in conflict. I just think we've exhausted the landscape.

You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.

I get quite disappointed that we're still telling stories that I think are problematic in terms of what they're saying about women.

I feel that it's important to fail now and again. For instance, if I go for a job and I don't get it, that makes me not a better person, but more balanced, more aware of what life is really like.

Motherhood so often comes in conflict with women's capacity to express and live their own lives.

Your desire to please... actors are people pleasers and if somebody says your vocal choice in this was ridiculous or whatever you will come back and do it differently. So, to avoid getting into a situation where you're altering your performance way down the line you have to just not do it at all. It's hard and I have done it in the past to disastrous consequences!

I love science fiction. I read a lot of science fiction.

Acting is a strange job because your control is very limited.

I would love to live free of the fear and sadness and real desperation that I think the effect of childbirth has on women, especially because we are expected to be so concerned by recovery from childbirth.

I don't really want to do things that I feel like are going to send out a message that I don't really want to sign up for.

I just don't believe you're capable of being an actor unless you have a desire to experience your emotions in a public way.

I think it's very repressive for a woman to be constantly told that she has to make films about women to better represent women, but then the reverse is not found.

Our conception of 1950s underwear is a lovely vintage aesthetic, but actually, wearing stockings with no elastic and a girdle was heavy duty.

I don't really want to play parts that I think are not fully developed or fleshed out, especially with female roles.

Films about women and their concerns are seen as frivolous, limited and, most damaging of all, niche.

I have always been interested in gender politics, so I'm not that keen on doing things that don't represent a truth about women.

As a kid, I really loved 'Jane Eyre,' I used to fantasise that the past was so much better and my lifetime was crap.

When you talk to women who were working as print journalists or in broadcasting in the '50s, and then you talk to women who were working in the late '60s, there's an enormous difference. There had already been a huge transition. Then, of course, you get well into the '70s and there were women with children working.

I realise there's an innate paradox in promoting oneself on the one hand and saying, 'Oh, I don't want to be famous,' on the other.

The advent of digitally enhancing images - and the fact that actresses weren't protesting against that - created an environment where big corporations felt like they had total ownership over the bodies of actresses.

It's hard for actors to have to deal with the fact that they pour so much into their character, but the audience might have a negative assessment of them.

Female ambition is such a complicated thing to play because it is an aggressive quality, and people respond very badly to women exhibiting any kind of aggression.

I'd actually really love to review books and films and plays, but you can't be an artist and a critic. I would love it if I could.

Normally, when youre working on something, there are other characters that you have alliances with, and you have unified goals with some characters.

I have a very strong, probably slightly aggressive personality, and so that just ends up coming out regardless of what I try to do.

I really like films and plays that cross over different genres. So I'd like to do something that you think is a drama and then you think is a supernatural thing and then becomes a drama again. That's very vague.

I think if I was ever really going to be more serious about writing I'd have to try and find some way to do it with other people. I do find the silence kind of eerie.

I can only do something that my sister or my daughter, if I have one, could watch and feel positive about.

Postwar Europe was morally stagnant, and there was a lot of neo-conservatism.

I think it is kind of important to direct someone so the character is appealing, but, as an actress, I find it frustrating because I think, "Why do I have to be more likable than a man would have to be saying the same line?"

My alter egos have changed a lot over the years. When I was a child, I was a black horse called Storm. Whinnying and jumping over bamboo poles in the garden took up pretty much my entire childhood.

I love '30 Rock.' Absolutely love it. It's a game-changing show.

If I have to spend prolonged periods of time in a trailer, I go mad. Stuck in a metal box doing nothing, I lie there paralysed with boredom.

I love the theatre and I love working in the theatre but I'm a big cinefile and I love the movies. I also do scribble but to limited success! I think I find being in a room on my own quite hard, which I think a lot of actors do because what we do is so inter-active. It's a very supportive profession... despite its reputation for being highly competitive it's actually one of the most collaborative professions you can do in the arts because you're always working in a team.

I wish I was a more adventurous person in a way. But actually, security is a really big deal for me.

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

We live in a society where children are expected to become adults overnight.

When you're on stage, you build strong relationships with the actors, but it's a story you tell with the audience - you have to include them, you have to respond to them, they have to understand the narrative.

I want people to think I'm sexy, but to know also that I've got an ordinary body and not feel intimidated.

If you're going to make great art, you have to make it at a huge cost - you have to be prepared to sacrifice what other people think of you, other people's opinions, and you have to make personal sacrifices.

I cheated at the Model United Nations when I was 13 and had to get up and apologise in front of the whole conference.

I think with the best actors, emotion is something that has no kind of check in them.

If you are an actress in L.A., on your 40th birthday they should just hand you the keys to the lunatic asylum.

I would argue that something dark is lurking between the sexes, and that it is seeping out into cinema.

The language of freedom-fighting was so co-opted by the baby boomers in order to express their now-hopelessly compromised ideologies that no other generation could emulate it without a smirk. This has created an apathetic generation in the West, with young people no longer distinguishing between the old order and the new.

Nowadays, most women just assume they have a right to be in the workplace, and any kind of discrimination they suffer is sort of more creeping.

I'm fundamentally a busy person; I spend my time doing useful things and profoundly useless things!